


vi

by Eliahst (EPaXLeo)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Inhumanity, Mind Screw, Suicide Attempt, Supernatural Elements, Trans Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 18:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EPaXLeo/pseuds/Eliahst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agency is something not everyone has at their fingertips. Sometimes you have to break the pen and rip the pages out before you can write your own story.</p><p>[Resumed as of 16/3/15, chapters posted sporadically]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Epilogue.

 It's so close to winter break, just a night and a school day away actually, and Will is close to committing homicide on his literature teacher.

If she wanted a memoir, he'd  _give_ her a goddamn memoir.

The reflection of his face in his desktop's screen as he begins to type would  be enough to scare a demon straight back to Hell.

* * *

 

 

  
A MEMOIR OF THE POINT by Will McKinnon.

Red, raised marks litter his back. And his arms. And his legs, neck, sides, even his _face_. He’s been scratching again.

He just can’t help it! It just feels like he is wearing a suit, an ill-flitting one, lined with wool and pine needles. It itches but it is not an itch he can physically scratch. He laughs at that thought. He could no more take his nails to this irritation than he could stop a flood with sheer force of will. The only reprieve he would get would come at the end of a knife. Either professionally to alter, or personally to remedy, a blade is the only answer he can see. No, the only answer he can  _think of_  because he can literally not see anything with the slightest resemblance to a cutting tool.

From where he is sat, squat in the corner of the women’s wash room at the end of the hall that counts classrooms one-oh-one to one-seventy-one, the only things he can see are white stone walls, questionable stains and the tiny, pale mist of his own breath on the clammy, chilled air. None of these things help him, save the last. Nothing quite like gulping down disgusting bathroom odors too remove his mind from this godawful notch under his skin.

He wants to cleave and split and rend until the itch is gone and his insides are his outsides and he can take an issue straight to the front door of the culprit for his discomfort. But he cannot. It just is not in the cards. He does not have the chance, or the tools, now to get in. He could _find them_ of course, but he has already marked himself, visibly, vividly, in a style that brings him great attention. Down his arms, snaking up his neck, creeping lazily into bloom under his drooping right eye.

So easily seen, so quickly remembered.

He had not thought. He had not taken the time to step back. He had missed the best chance, the first opportunity to alleviate his problem. A small voice had whispered that he would _absolutely_ be able to hold back from trying to fix it without giving his full attention to this rippling, sandy grating under his skin. Next thing he knew, he was slipping his sleeve up to find skin run white from the catch of his nails. One request later, smooth voice and no alarm, finds himself hiding away in a bathroom, shaking and caught, unable to move if not to scrape and tear and  _fix_.

But he has to. He has to make himself stand and face his reflection, that damned flip image with too long hair, too smooth face, cow eyes, and the beginning of curves that should not be, and see what he can fix.

He prods and pokes, stretches some bits and crushes down others, yanks out the lines of his clothes until they tell the story he wants, imply the images he knows are truth. When he gets a chance — the  _first_  chance — he swears he will take scissors to his stupid locks, make it  _right_.

He doesn’t know the words, the terminology or the slurs, that will be printed on his skin in the years to come. He doesn’t know how much it will hurt. He doesn’t have the experience to see that beyond the itch under his skin is a projected lifetime of trouble.

He doesn’t even know he should be calling himself a ‘he’. He just knows something is  _wrong_ , not a sickness but a product wrapped in the wrong box.

All he really knows at this tender and cracking age of eleven is that his name is Eve Jacob McKinnon, and that something is seriously not right.

But he can fix it, he swears. It’s his life, his story, and he has to make it right.

Or die trying.

* * *

There. It's done. He's.  _Finished._ Let her choke on that!

He starts laughing, but nearly half way through the third cough of amusement it goes from cheer to dread, from the rush of completion and sticking the truth right into a naysayer's face al the way to cold sludge running under his ribs. 

He slams his hands down on the keyboard, leaving a trail of gibberish letters at the bottom of the page as well as opening two more windows he can't see straight enough to read. "Damnit!" 

He had been so sure that he could write about it without going cold. He had been  _so sure_. But, as with everything he tried to do, he had been wrong. He feels it, trying up the joints in his hands, pulling fists out of loose typing fingers, setting his teeth to grind, and he does not like it.

All he had had to do was write a memoir of an important point in his childhood. So simple, not even a paper that should have taken more than thirty minutes. Anyone else could have banged it out with no more fuss than any high schooler takes to an assigned writing, but no. Not  _him._ He could have picked anything else. Hell, he could have picked something exceptionally stupid and just played it up! But no, he had said, the instructions said to pick an important moment, and he did, even when it landed him in the middle of this bullshit. _  
_

He is so goddamn _stupid_ _!_  It's like he's actively searching out oportunities to make himself feel like shit.

"Shit, why can't I just be _normal?_  " He snarls, voice small and tiny and so much less than he wanted it to be, "If I didn't spend all my damn time just ruining my own life, this wouldn't happen."

 _This is just another round of 'who sucks at life? YOU DO!' playing in my damn head and I just need to stop. I can_ stop _right? It's just a bunch of made up shit. I don't have to get angry._ He tries to take slow breaths, but it escalates back into thunderous wheezing as his thoughts amp up again.  _No one knows. It's a new school, I look completely different, nobody looks at me and asks if I'm on my period. But some of them know. One, two, four, ten, twenty, they all know. They're just humoring me until I 'get over this phase'. They're laughing when I'm not looking. Those fucking assholes. Not a single one of them can even treat me like I'm human. I should just fucking LEAVE if they're not going to take me seriously. I AM THE WRITER OF MY OWN STORY. I am the writer of my own story. Iamthewriterofmyownstory. I decide how the plot goes, I write the lines, I cut the words onto the page._

_And I'm not going to let them decide when I should write the ending. They want to draw it the fuck out. Well, you know what self?_

_What?_ Even in his own head he's sarcastic, asking questions he already knows the answers to.

_I'm writing the ending. This is the last page. No more drama, no more torturing the main characters for no reason. This is the season finale and they can all just **fucking deal with it.**_

He slams his hands down on the keyboard again, and glares at the screen. The little black words, font size twelve in one point five spacing, more of other people's rules saying that he should do, should be, sometihng according to words not his own. _Well, fuck them_ , he screams behind clenched teeth. He will not be writing fanfiction to anyone else's books, not anymore. His life is original fiction, worthy of publication.

After this next chapter, he thinks with a smile damming back sobs, his book will be at the top of the charts, on every news channel, quoted on the lips of every last insufferable person in the country.

He kicks back the chair, catching it at the last second. No reason to advertise such a sensational story in advance. He'll leave a note with him when he finishes. Those last words will be too much to leave sitting on a sad little pirated writing program, burning into the screen. No keys and file types for this. This plot? It deserves traditional media.

There's a demin messenger bag by his feet, burried under moldering food wrappers and nicotine-stained plastic, and it's still heavy with the still unpacked remains of his last trip but it doesn't matter. There's still enough room for his supplies. A good author never goes unprepared, after all.

Never before has he been so glad that he never cleans up than when he finds the knife, still tacky with crusted on food. In the bag it goes, clanking loudly with his other necessity. He will have to be careful that no one hears it, the sound so evident of what he will be doing. Oh, whoever hears it won't be able to infer the whole of the situation, but it will be enough to stop him. And he will not be stopped. Not this time.

He pokes his head into the living room, puts on his best face and tells his mom that he's going over to a friend's house in the neighborhood next door. Yeah, just going to see a friend. After tomorrow the friend will be on break, going somewhere for the holidays, so this is his last chance to see her. She wishes him a good time, says for him to be back before it gets dark. Which is in, oh right, two hours. Yeah, he tells her, he'll be back by then. 

Just one lie after another, but what is a story but a string of fanciful, beautiful lies? He knows she will appreciate it more after it gets published. Everyone loves a finished story more than a work in progress. 

It's both a long walk and a short jaunt to his goal. He could just do it in his yard, on familiar territory, but that feels so cliche. Plus, there would be the added risk of someone stilling his hand on the final sentence. Where he's going, the perfect writer's retreat, there are only trees and refuse and tiny, uncaring frogs. The perfectly aware yet still apathetic audience to such a huge act of literature. Perfect dissonance for a perfect ending chapter.

A log, grey with age and rot, roots mumified into stark spires rising up and digging down to anchor it in place, crosses the creek. Yes, the best spot. The notebook sits level on his crossed legs, the knife balances perfectly in his white-knuckled fingers, and the bottle lays without rocking to his left. The first two he leaves where they are, but the last he takes in hand, unscrews the cap with one twist of his fingers before swallowing half of the near full bottle in one go.

It leaves him coughing, gasping against the burn, but it also gives him time. While he waits for the warmth to spread, for his head to go to fluff at the edges, he can write. So he does.

_So, you've found me. I wonder how long it took. Did you start the first day, or did it take you fuckers a few days to finally remember that your favorite pull string toy wasn't around anymore? I'm tired of you all trying to shove me into little boxes and calling me miss when I am not a miss, never was, never will be. You wanted to keep writing my book for me, shoving in foot notes and post scripts about how I was an unreliable narrator, but I'm tired of it. You aren't getting anymore out of me, not anymore._

_This is the last page, you ungrateful, insufferable jackasses. I have some demands from the afterlife, first._

_I had better not look back on you guys from Hell and see 'she', 'her', or 'miss' on anything about me._

_And not a single one of you can write my sequel. My story is finished, last work, bound and published. You did not have the right to change it when I was alive, so you sure as hell do not have that right when I'm dead._

_See you bitches in Hell,_

_Will J McKinnon._

His head is starting to float, and keeping his balance on the fallen tree is getting difficult. He uncrosses his legs and drapes them over the curl of dying bark, digging the heels of his shoes in to keep him upright. He won't be stopped by falling into the water, he will not let his resolve be washed away. He has to do this.

His right hand, still holding the knife, curved and serated and thick metal tang bolted together, is sitting lax beside him. This will be so easy.  He lifts up the blade, and looks it over. It is still as sharp as it was when first bought. It won't give him any trouble.

He rips up the sleeve on his left arm, baring the outside of his forearm all crisscrossed with white lines of all thickness. It's art; it's the words he hasn't yet transcribed. The inside of his arm, however, is unmarked. Pale skin, kept light through a slow and steady march into nocturnality. It calls to him. It sings crooning promises of release. He knows what he had to do. Just take the knife, cut from elbow crux to the bend of the wrist, and cut  _deep_. None of that nonsense across the arm. A perpendicular cut would just sting and burn, then crust over and taunt him with his failure.

A quick search, years ago, had told him how to do it right. Even though the instructions had been jeers and informality, this act would remain a pristine act of judgment and overt professionalism. 

He presses the tip of the knife to the tiny dip between the bones of his elbow, then he stops at the first twinge of splitting skin.

Most of him, the backsitting voice that chants melodious promises and vows in his own tongue, says that this is the right choice. This is him, truly, and it knows him better than anyone else, because he knows himself better than anyone else. That voice had been the one rolling off his tongue and floating in the forefront of his mind when he made the decision, when he scratch the final words into the page. But now, there is another voice. It is loud, beligerent and wobbly. It demands his attention. It barges into the room, kicks over the podium and shouts so loudly that he cannot help but listen.

It says  _ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS? ARE YOU SO WILLING TO THINK THAT ANYONE YOU'VE EVER SPOKEN TO IS JUST A BACKGROUND VILLAIN WAITING TO VALIDATE YOUR VICTIM COMPLEX? ARE YOU REALLY SO GODDAMN SELFISH THAT YOU THINK YOU'RE THE CENTER OF EVERYONE'S ATTENTION? YOU ARE NOT WORTH THEIR TIME. THEY DON'T CARE WHAT YOU DO, WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE. IF YOU REALLY THINK THEY'RE WAITING IN THE WINGS TO SPOUT SLURS AND GARBAGE UNTIL YOU DO WHAT YOU WERE PLANNING TO DO, THEN YOU ARE SO GODDAMN STUPID THAT EVEN ME, WHO IS YOU, DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH YOUR SHIT. THROW DOWN THE FUCKING KNIFE, PICK YOURSELF UP, AND STOP BEING SO GODDAMN SORRY FOR YOURSELF. THINK ABOUT YOUR FUCKING PARENTS, YOU ASSHOLE. DO YOU REALLY THINK THEY'RE GOING TO LAUGH AT YOUR FUNERAL? THEY WILL CRY. THEY WILL C R Y FOR DAYS BECAUSE YOUR STUPID ASS COULDN'T STOP BEING A FUCKING PUSSY ASS BITCH LONG ENOUGH TO SEE THEM TO THE GRAVE FIRST._

But no, it still isn't finished. Not even when he presses the knife harder, not even when he breaks into muscle and starts the downward stroke in desperate attempts to make it shut the Hell up.

It heaps on, barking and gnashing, slobbering at the mouth in drunken rage,  _YOU CAN'T DO THIS. YOU'VE TRIED THIRTY-FOUR GODDAMN TIMES, AND YOU'VE NOT SUCCEEDED ONCE. NOT ONE FUCKING TIME. YOU WON'T GET LUCKY THIS TIME. SOMETHING WILL FUCKING STOP YOU, LIKE EVERY TIME._

 _  
__It's not time to end the story yet._

The voices, the mental tones he embodies his ideas and emotions in, they mesh. They work together for the first time he can remember, and that is what makes his fingers go slack. The knife starts to fall, then he hears it.

Light footfalls, too many too quickly, getting closer. He doesn't have the body control to look straight at it, not quickly, not as drunk as he is now. He doesn't want to fall. He knows from the sound that it has to be an animal. Probably a cat, with all the strays he has seen around. 

He only begins to look when he hears and feels it hop up onto his perch. 

It is most certainly _not_ a cat. It also is very much not any animal he has seen before.

It stands what looks to be two feet, maybe three, high, with it's body, and another foot with horns. Because this thing has _horns_. Antlers, really, curved and branching like on the oldest buck in the herd. It looks at him with large eyes, greyed out irises desperately missing pupils, floating with strange bouyancey in black sclera, like it's sizing him up, and he hopes it isn't hungry. A pelt of glistening silver and crimson scales, raised and sharp, decorates it from the bloom of it's heavy snout down to the end of it's wide, flat tail. It might have the general build of a house cat, but it is something that he feels he should never have had any right to see. It feels like he is breaking his own forth wall. Like he's seeing the result of some godawful forum contest.

He makes a show of averting his eyes. He has no idea if it is a real animal or if it is just a final shot by his fracturing mind to give him something other than suicide to focus on, but he isn't taking any chances. It, alarmingly, creeps closer. Out of the corner of his eye he sees it blink with a third eyelid and he instantly tenses. It sniffs at his hair, and he knows he doesn't have any way out of this. Too drunk to fight, the only ways to run involving either trying to get standing on this rocking log without falling, or tipping back into freezing water that will shock him long enough for the whatever it is to start eating.  He might be seeing double, but he can't see a way out.

It comes closer, he feels the thing's paw, much larger than it should be for such a small thing, and he thinks what he hopes is not his last thought,  _I'm so fucked._

Then, in a flash, it grabs the knife out of his hand with one fast bite, and he can hear the metal bending in that snap, before it bounds off, springing off of him hard. The force of the lunge sends him toppling to land with a splash in ice-cold water that swiftly swallows him up.

It's a flash burn, a shock that draws the skin on his face together fast and knocks the breath out of his lungs. Freezing water drives up his nose, chokes him, stings all the way down the wrong pipe. He fights but he is slowed by his drink, and his clothes are heavy with water and dragging him down. 

_This is it. I get offed by a hallucination. My own head won't even let me write my own story._

_This is bullshit._

He kicks up, splashing water and rocks out in his wake. He refuses to be left to breathe water and quit. The air, when he reaches it, burns worse than the liquid coating his airways. He wretches, vomiting up his lunch and so much cold death. The smell is taken away on wind now more intense, the fresh air fills his lungs to bursting again and again as he sucks in the perfect antithesis to the drowning pain.

Across from him the beast sits pretty and dry, chomping his knife to pieces. He spares a short thought for his favored piece of cutlery before he lunges. It dodges neatly to leave him planting nose first into wet silt.

He does not bother to right himself completely. Rather, he rolls onto his back and props himself on his elbows. He scowls and slaps his hands in the wash of the creek. 

"This isn't fair!" He screams. "The one time I was  _so_ close, and then this! I can't even let.  _Myself._ Win." He trails off, the birth of a sob in his throat.

The beast  _mrrr_ s at him over the remains of its dinner then begins to creep closer.

"Oh, no.  _Hells_ no! You get away! You already fucked up my plans!"

It ignores his calls and threats and bounds carelessly towards him. Neatly dodging a wildly kicking foot weighed down by water-logged denim, it sits smugly between his splayed legs. The antlers shine the murky cloud light back into his stinging eyes but he is too angry to care.

Then it yawns. 

It's mouth is full of teeth too big to fit in its mouth and all of them canines. The top of its mouth is ridged with more, smaller, teeth-like protusions, and the tongue to plated in the style of that nightmare parasite he had once read about. Not promising. Nothing was promising about this, unless it was promising a painful and undiginified death.

At the close of it's mouth, it stares at him, no,  _through_ him and deeper. Like it can see more of him than there is to show. It assessing him, even daring closer to his frantic self to take a long sniff at his matted, nasty hair before leaning back onto its haunches.

"Well?" He askes, utterly unable to process anymore. He is cold and wet and tired both physically and mentally. He does not want to deal with anything more. "Are you going to eat me or not, you stupid hallucination?"

The eyes, those damned eyes, come so close that even crossing his own does not clear the image. A darker cloud has moved in the path of the sun, setting the scene to near night light, aligning the stage so that those eyes under the scaled brow illuminate with all colors at once. And then he  _knows._

" _No,_ " it says, " _The story is not yet finished. You must finish it. You must end the ones who writes what must never be laid to page._ " _  
_

It isn't sound. It isn't words or language, but he _understands_. He has to do something. Something much larger than failing at school and trying to find death at every turn.

This story has not yet run its course. Before he can pen his own resolution, he must take action.

And the first step is getting as far away from these trees and his bad decisions and this bungle of cryptozoology as possible.

He scrambles to his feet, racing up the bank of the valley, bag forgotten. He doesn't hear the animal trotting behind him, and for that he is glad. He doesn't need this specific brand of crazy following him home when his plate is already filled to breaking.

He stumbles into his house, mutters something about needing to look something up to his mom when he passes her on his way to his bedroom. He ignores her calling his name, her voice wavering with concern at him being dripping water when he had left bone dry. Once he is inside, he shoves his dresser in front of his bedroom door with a loud scrape and slam of wood on wood.

A T-shirt becomes a tourniquet for his mangled elbow, and he doesn't even care if it's clean. It stops the bleeding, even though he knows he's done enough damage to render that arm useless for the foreseeable future. He tucks that arm into his pants pocket and makes his way over to his desk and gets what he needs.

Laptop in hand, he goes to the search bar.

His life, so close to an end, feels like it is only beginning.


	2. Unhelpful

It isn’t even the end of first period  and he is already weighing the pros and cons of committing homicide. He doesn’t even have a good reason for it. With most of the class already being gone -- those lucky bastards that got to skip out for an extra day of break because of pandering, idiot parents are going to get bit by the karma dog at some point , he just knows it -- his biology class has turned into movie hour. It’s some monotone, droning  enviro n mental  swamp video from the nineties with all the subtlety and grace that educational cinema from that time was known for (none) and the other nine people who had to actually attend class have been asleep or on their phones for a good twenty minutes now.

Regardless of the worksheet he, and the rest of them, have to fill out, he’s been filling in the margins with his chicken scratch. He can be forgiven for not paying the film the attention it deserves, because not only is he hungover beyond what a merciful god would allow, he’s also got the beginning of the flu. That short dip in the creek had, apparently, been just enough to kick the cold into gear. His head is stuffed up, not enough to hurt his ability to breathe, just enough to make him uncomfortable and tired. The headache pounding between his ears is so much worse on top of that. Add in the bright, flashing lights of the film and that one ceiling light that one stop flickering, and he well and truly is in Hell.

At the very top of his ‘pros of killing everyone in this room’ list he has ‘snoring guy will stop,’ ‘girl with flashing light as  i P hone  text notification will stop getting texts,’ and ‘quiet will make head stop hurting.’ The list of negatives is much shorter, but somehow much more convincing with it’s only point being ‘prison.’

The lists are pretty evenly matched, and it’s only the bell ringing at the end of class, with Mr.  Gregor  thankfully not making them turn into the worksheets, that keeps him from just going for the felony regardless of consequences. 

The next class is not even bothering with putting up the illusion of work getting done. The projector shows the screen of Mr.  Runnen’s  email, which means the class is mostly going to be full of usually pretty cool videos the guy has gotten forwarded to him by other cool teacher, none of whom Will can remember the names or faces of at the moment. Mr.  Runnen’s  a good teacher. Dude knows when his students don’t really give a crap, and when those times line up with when it doesn’t matter if he teacher or not, the guy gives them all a break. He’s a saint among heathens. 

Will contemplates sending the man a fruit basket, not seriously, when he slides into his seat in the back corner. When the teacher comes by and closes the blinds on the window, the joking idea becomes a certainty. The man deserves it like no one in history has ever deserved a fruit basket.

Of course, the gentle almost silence of the other ten or so people filing into the room is broken by what would on any other day be a good sight: It’s Addison, dressed in what Will is pretty sure are her pajamas and grinning ear to multiple pierced ear as she skips over to him.

Now,  Addi’s  a good looking girl. Not in the “Oh, man, I have to have that girl as my girlfriend or the world is going to end” sort of way, but Will  will  fight to the death anyone who says she isn’t pretty. As opposed to her usual day, he can tell that she hasn’t done more than the bare minimum on her appearance. Her hair is bright, colorful with bright blue and red burns to the ends of her orange hair, but it’s frizzy, flying away in every direction like she rubbed a bushel of balloons against it before she walked into the room. Her face is round, still childish with big brown eyes and a freckle or two, which tells him that she has fully embraced the coming two weeks of vacation a day early. Any other day and he wouldn’t be seeing those freckles for the foundation or whatever it was that she used to make herself like she had stepped out of a movie. She’ missing her nose ring, and the barbell she normally had through her left eyebrow is gone as well.

Her clothes, now that she’s sitting in the seat ahead of him, turned around to lean her elbows on his desk, are most definitely her pajamas. Black fleece matching top and bottoms, covered in the Batman symbol, clashing fashionably with her military boots in the way that all of her clothing choices did. 

Will suddenly feels like he hasn’t gone hard enough into not giving a shit, just in a plain black shirt, jeans, sneakers and fleece jacket. Her shirt even has a grease stain on it! 

Of course, he appreciates all of this from under the sense- and mind-dulling ache of a hangover and cold, so the first thing that comes out of his mouth upon seeing her face is, “You have freckles?”

His remark earns him an exasperated frown and a smack on the side of his face. “You ask that every time I don’t do my makeup,” she said on a snort, but she immediately switched tracks upon noticing his strong wince at the friendly love tap. “Wait, what’s wrong?”

He lifts his arms in a shrug, but that turns out to be the wrong thing to do, considering that it puts his thickly-bandaged arm into view. She grabs hold of his arm and slides down his sleeve and. Wow. It bled a lot more than he thought it had. The material is nearly black with blood, and if he had seen this first thing in morning on one of his friends he would be freaking out too. 

Addi  doesn’t shriek or scream, doesn’t even raise her voice. She looks from his arm, to his face, then does it again. It’s obvious what she’s thinking, and the look on her face makes Will want to just pull his sleeve down and reroute. So that’s what he does.

He pulls his arm out of her  gras , slowly and carefully, and plasters a strained smile on his face when he says, “It’s just a hangover. I dropped the glass and fell in it and fucked up my arm.”

At the mention of ‘fuck’ the girl sitting to his left, Marjorie, he thinks her name is, shoots her hand up. He never liked her. Still mentally stuck in middle school, thinking every swear word from ‘crap’ to ‘motherfucker’ needed to be reported straight to authority. 

He’s  gonna  find out what locker she has and put a dead fish in it. 

Addi  hears his answer and returns right away with her own question, “I thought Brian already got on your case for drinking? And how the bleeding fuck do you fall on broken glass? I’ve seen you drunk. You’re not that unbalanced.”

“I dropped it next to the computer, and I fell out of the chair trying to go to bed.” Please buy this, I don’t need an intervention today. “I forgot to bandage it  til  this morning, and here we are.”

She looks ready to start in on her ribbing. Oh, that Will, what an alcoholic with his shenanigans. That spark in her eye holds a promise of an active and engaged hour, and he can’t have that.

Before she can say anything, he  thunks  his head down onto the table. He said, muffled, “Can we not do this? I feel like I’ve been murdered.”

She patted his head, ruffling his already messy hair, and said fondly, “Not even possible. We’re not doing anything today and I’m. So. Bored.”

“Do you not have any human decency? What if you were hungover? Would you want me to bug you?”

“Moot point, there, Willy. I don’t drink. Because I’m not an alcoholic at fourteen.” She stuck her tongue at him, and he responded with the same.

“I’m fifteen, you  asshat .”

“You know that makes it worse and. Wait, what?” She looks utterly baffled when she says, “Since when are you fifteen? You’re in a freshman math class!”

Will’s eyebrows try to disappear into his hairline at that. He says, “I haven’t told you about that? I failed gym last year. And math. And biology. And the other part of math. But the math thing, I have an excuse! She was so fucking condescending and it drove me nuts and...”

It goes on for a while, leaving  Addi  complete enraptured by the long and sordid tale of his failed academic life, and for that he is unrepentantly glad. He really did not want to have to spend the whole hour trying to avoid being hassled for his drinking. It isn’t like he drink that much, anyway!

Soon, thankfully,  Addi’s  attention is taken by the embarrassing video of another math teacher’s high school wrestling days, played at a mercifully low volume for Will’s head. Sometimes, he’s happy that he can lie so well.

The period ends a lot sooner than he wants it to. He knows that his next class won’t be lacking in activity, so he marches to the gym like a man to his death. Just as he had feared, the first thing on the  agender  is ‘free time.’ Any other class, and that would mean he could curl up in the corner and groan his misery to the floorboards. In this one, it means that he can do whatever he wants -- so long as he is active and engaged.

He wants with all he has to just scream, “No!” But, alas, he cannot. Rather, he listlessly walks laps around the gym, stopping every few paces to hunch over and cough up what feel like a solid ounce of sand and mucous. The whole situation is made worse by the fact that roughly every time he looks up he sees the smugly grinning, yet sweaty, face of his friend passing him at thrice his speed. Said friend was, frankly, a douchebag. But, like all of Will’s friends, that was what made them friends. 

Jay, however, was a little more douche-y than the rest of Will’s companions. A little darker with the jokes, a little more willing to hit people where it hurt when making a point. A good dude, in Will’s opinion. An enviable dude, actually. And it doesn’t do a single good thing for Will’s sense of self that not only is Jay athletic, he’s also  difinitively  male. There’s no ambiguity, no getting stranger asking if he’s “actually a chick.” Most of the time, Will tries to keep this to himself, but there’s some times, like now for instance, where he’s tired and aching and just so completely willing (no pun intended) to let his jealousy become spite.

Not that he’s ever going to let Jay know about that.

He doesn’t have time, however, to be spiteful for long, because Coach Roberts is rallying everyone for an announcement. Since the rain has stopped, they’re all going to go up to the track for the rest of the period. While Jay may be happy about that -- the guy sure loves his open air -- Will has pretty much just been promised Hell.

He couldn’t say that the wet, cold air wasn’t feeling great in his clogged lungs, but that was the only thing good about this. Between him and the track, raised up forty feet above the flat ground of the school for some ungodly reason, were stairs. A lot of them. Being sick and hungover is not a good mix with the nightmare that is the rigorous elevation and stress of climbing stairs. 

Well , he thinks,  Might as well make a show of it.

He takes his sweet time going up the steps, groaning and huffing and coughing -- the last of which was not an  overaction , he really could barely breathe -- with the struggle to lift one foot after another. He really should have stayed home today.

Gym lasts for another sinful thirty minutes, and when it finally ends he almost falls to his knees and prays to an absent god for the fact that he has lunch at the start of the next period. Well, he has health immediately after, so it’s not  all  good, but a thirty-five minute nap in the library sounds like exactly what he needs. He feels like he wouldn’t be able to keep any food down anyway, so missing out on the ‘food’ part of lunch doesn’t sound bad to him.

As he lays on the short, wrought iron bench in the reading section of the library, he tries to think back to what horrible things he could have possible done to deserve th is. The entire library is full to bursting with people chatting loudly, eating their lunches even though you’re not supposed to be allowed to eat in there, and an entire class of first-year freshmen running around doing some stupid find-and-fill-in task with the books and computer. And none of them have the decency to be quiet. Homicide. That was his future.

After lunch, his luck drastically improves. Health,  amazingly , only has three people show up for class, so rather than be subjected to more horrifying pictures of diseased  genetalia , they get an entire movie of it. Which, granted, will scar him for the rest of his short, short life, but since they aren’t required to write anything down or turn anything in because of it, he still claims it as a success. Following that, his American government teacher just opens up a box of donuts and tells the class -- all of ten people out of the usual thirty -- to dig in. Then he just plays music for the rest of the period. The beat kind of hurts his head, but otherwise it’s a pretty relaxing class. And finally, what he’s expecting to be the best class of the day if his luck keeps up, chemistry just turns into examining chemic reactions.

By making cupcakes in the home economics room. Seriously, this was the best day of his life. At least it  was , until he moonwalks out of  chem  at the final bell only to run back-first into a six-and-a-half foot gothic girl known as Misa Nguyen and had a damn heart attack.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't actually remember where this story was going.


End file.
